Desargues’s theorem, in geometry, mathematical statement discovered by the French mathematician Girard Desargues in 1639 that motivated the development, in the first quarter of the 19th century, of projective geometry by another French mathematician, Jean-Victor Poncelet. The theorem states that if two triangles ABC and A′B′C′, situated in three-dimensional space, are related to each other in such a way that they can be seen perspectively from one point (i.e., the lines AA′, BB′, and CC′ all intersect in one point), then the points of intersection of corresponding sides all lie on one line (seeFigure), provided that no two corresponding sides are parallel. Should this last case occur, there will be only two points of intersection instead of three, and the theorem must be modified to include the result that these two points will lie on a line parallel to the two parallel sides of the triangles. Rather than modify the theorem to cover this special case, Poncelet instead modified Euclidean space itself by postulating points at infinity, which was the key for the development of projective geometry. In this new projective space (Euclidean space with added points at infinity), each straight line is given an added point at infinity, with parallel lines having a common point. After Poncelet discovered that Desargues’s theorem could be more simply formulated in projective space, other theorems followed within this framework that could be stated more simply in terms of only intersections of lines and collinearity of points, with no need for reference to measures of distance, angle, congruence, or similarity.

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...but collinearity is, and he provided an example, possibly useful to artists, in images of triangles seen from different points of view. The statement that accompanied this example became known as Desargues’s theorem.

With Desargues’s provision of infinitely distant points for parallels, the reality plane and the projective plane are essentially interchangeable—that is, ignoring distances and directions (angles), which are not preserved in the projection. Other properties are preserved, however. For instance, two different points have a unique connecting line, and two different lines have a unique...

...work was well known by his contemporaries, but half a century after his death he was forgotten. His work was rediscovered at the beginning of the 19th century, and one of his results became known as Desargues’s theorem.